Talk:Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

Choosing which source to cite

Hello, thanks to Gary King for rationalizing the footnotes, etc. There are some places where he switched the citation from some other source to Solomon's biography. The particular one I have in mind here is switching from Deutsch to Solomon re. what Mozart called himself.

I've switched this one back (and plan to do a few more as I have time). In the present case, there are two reasons.

• First, Deutsch makes this as a direct declaration, based on his study of the documents. I think that for this particular claim, Deutsch is a more direct and trustable source.
• More generally, I don't see any merit in cutting down on the diversity of sources cited. Rather, in any given case, we should go with the most detailed, trustable source available. Sincerely, Opus33 (talk) 17:50, 19 May 2008 (UTC)

Feel free to cite more than one source for the same fact. Nothing wrong with that either. It happens all the time in the literature and with footnotes, the extra citation is not that obtrusive. DavidRF (talk) 04:30, 21 May 2008 (UTC)

Good point.

So, I went back to the citation of Solomon (1995) that I had removed, to check out the case at hand--might Solomon serve as a good backup for Deutsch? Unfortunately, the Solomon reference says nothing about what Mozart called himself in general and thus is not an appropriate citation here. I suspect now that the editor who did these changes may not have read the sources and that quite a bit of work might be needed to fix the damage. Opus33 (talk) 15:50, 21 May 2008 (UTC)

More citation problems

Concerning whether Mozart's output declined during the late 1780's: Steptoe actually provides data (counting the works). The Solomon reference does not; it should not have been substituted. Opus33 (talk) 17:17, 21 May 2008 (UTC)

Auto-bibliography software is not ready for prime time

A previous edit implemented a system in which the bibliography entries are entered as fields and auto-converted to a format displayed on the page. I have converted the bibliography back to text because of what I take to be serious flaws in this software:

• It permits editors to link the reader to particular bookseller. In this case, the editor in question consistently picked the Amazon web site. I definitely think we should not be endorsing one bookseller over another. (A further note: this problem was fixed years ago when the software was set up so that when the reader clicks on the ISBN number, (s)he is directed to a large, commercially-neutral set of options. The newer code re-introduces the old problem.)
• The current auto-bibliography formats the entries in a nonstandard and reader-unfriendly way. The purpose of the Author (Date) format is to make it easy to find a reference by using your eyes to scan the page for a simple, compact formula. The actual month and day of publication are trivia and make it harder for the reader to find the reference (s)he is looking for. To my knowledge, no professional scholarly outlet formats its bibliographies this way.

If someone ever bothers to clean up the bibliography-creating software to fix these problems, I think it would be fine to use it. Opus33 (talk) 16:04, 23 May 2008 (UTC)

Smallpox

Hello, I'm starting to read Ruth Halliwell's incredibly detailed book The Mozart Family, which includes informative material on Mozart and smallpox. Until 1796, with Edward Jenner's work, smallpox vaccination used an attenuated form of the human smallpox virus. This was very dangerous and sometimes caused the patient actually to die of smallpox. So vaccination was a very hard decision for the parents, Mozart's included. The simplistic sentence we had before, which makes Leopold appear like an ignorant, child-neglecting religious fundamentalist, doesn't really conveying the proper sense of the issue and I've taken it out.

I think sooner or latter the question of Mozart and smallpox vaccination should be discussed, but probably in a satellite article of some sort and not the main article. Opus33 (talk) 23:42, 27 May 2008 (UTC)

Opus, I read that book for class last semester and I think its questionable if he really had small pox. OblivionLdy67 (talk) 23:39, 9 July 2008 (UTC)

Hello Oblivion, are you sure? Maybe give me the page numbers? Thanks, Opus33 (talk) 05:47, 12 July 2008 (UTC)

Removing Project

I am removing Project:Freemasonry from the article... according to that project's stated scope, it deals with articles about the organization, not for individuals who were Freemasons. If this is a problem, please discuss at the Project talk page. Blueboar (talk) 03:29, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

Image sizes

A while ago someone removed all designations of image size, so that they all come out default width. I'm restoring the "hard" widths in a number of cases, specifically, in cases when the default width produced an illegible image.

I'm aware that in principle, users can set image size using the Wikipedia's software. However, I'm also convinced that this is a poor way to handle image sizes. The great majority of our readers have no idea that you can do this (think of your mother, if that helps), and so we serve them better by specifying sensible image sizes in the article itself. Please note that the policy page for images does permit editors to do this. Opus33 (talk) 22:43, 3 June 2008 (UTC)

A couple reverts

• I put back the "German composers" category. Mozart's citizenship was in the small independent nation-state of Salzburg. It's true that in later history, when the modern German-speaking nation-states were established, Salzburg ended up as part of Austria, not Germany, but this sort of thinking doesn't really take Mozart's perspective, as I think we should. His letters suggest he thought of himself as German (where "German" denoted an ethnicity rather than a country).
• I restore the original wording of the "Mozart in fiction" section, under the view that the section should do nothing other than tell readers that there is a satellite article. Opus33 (talk) 16:21, 18 June 2008 (UTC)

I think, we should remove both categories, Austrian xx and German xx.--80.109.98.103 (talk) 16:09, 19 June 2008 (UTC)

German or Austrian?

There's a case for both, but the case for being German is much stronger. He was born and brought up in Salzburg at a time when Salzburg was one of many German states within the Holy Roman Empire. Salzburg was not a part of Austria at that time. Salzburg did not become a part of Austria until the 19th century. So in Mozart's own time, he would have seen himself as a German. In fact, even in Mozart's time Austria itself was one of the German states within the Holy Roman Empire, so even Austrians would have considered themselves as Germans then. So I doubt if Mozart's later years when he was living in the Austrian capital, Vienna, made him feel any less German. It is only since 1866 (with the exception of the period (1938-1945) that Austria has not been a part of Germany, and it's only since the second world war that many Austrians have tended to distance themselves from the German label. The case for arguing that Mozart was an Austrian lies on the technical ground that Salzburg, where he was born and brought up, sits today inside Austria, and that he spent a large amount of his later years in Vienna, the capital of Austria. David Tombe (talk) 00:22, 21 July 2008 (UTC)

Not exactly. At the time of Mozart's birth, the seat of the Holy Roman Empire, ruled by the Hapsburgs, was Vienna. Based on your logic, those living in "the German states within the Holy Roman Empire" were actually Austrians too, not Germans! --TrustTruth (talk) 00:34, 21 July 2008 (UTC)

I was fully aware that the Habsburgs ruled the Holy Roman Empire from Vienna for hundreds of years. That didn't make the Germans in the other German states become Austrians. Bavarians didn't become Prussians when the Hohenzollerns ruled Germany from Berlin. Were you trying to put forward an argument to enhance the case that Mozart was an Austrian? Because if you were, it was not a logical argument. There is absolutely no way that Hanoverians or Prusians were ever considered to be Austrians in the days of the Holy Roman Empire. And even if they were, that still wouldn't stop them from being Germans. German is the umbrella term. Austrians were Germans, as were Liechtensteiners, and as are Bavarians, Prussians, Saxons and Hessians. Nowadays the issue of whether or not Austrians are Germans is controversial because of the second world war. David Tombe (talk) 02:09, 21 July 2008 (UTC)

I don't understand at all what this discussion is about and what David Tombe (talk · contribs) wants to achieve. The article doesn't refer to Mozart as Austrian nor German. There are a few categories which group by nationality. I am no great fan of such categories, but I accept they exist. As they do, I submit it would be baffling to most readers not to have Mozart listed in Category:Austrian composers and in Category:German composers. So, again: why did David Tombe ask the question: "German or Austrian?" Michael Bednarek (talk) 04:54, 21 July 2008 (UTC)

Bednarek, It wasn't me that raised the question. Check back through the history. I was only responding to the question. At the end of the day, while there are arguments both ways, there are also good arguments as to why Mozart should not be listed as an Austrian, whereas there are no good arguments as to why he should not be listed as a German. Being silent on the issue is not the correct approach. It should state clearly in the introduction that he was a German composer.David Tombe (talk) 08:46, 21 July 2008 (UTC)

Maybe there is a missunderstanding, otherwise it is POV: There was nor "Germany" in the meaning of a German "national" State (Nationalstaat) until 1871. The Holy Roman Empire (HRR) was not a German state, it was a loose confederation of germanspeaking states (most of them princedoms), and many national states followed on the territory of which was formerly the HRR: Germany, Austria, Eastern Part of Switzerland ... and even some Eastern/Central European states are now built on this territory which changed its frontiers and composition so frequently during its 1000 years of existance. So you cannot compare this loose confederation with a German national state. Why do Germans always try to equalize the Holy Roman Empire (HRR) with Germany, which is especially unfair for all the other states which followed the HRR! Learn some history ;-) -- Rfortner (talk) 16:26, 22 July 2008 (UTC)

Rfortner, you are twisting what was written above. I spoke about German states within the Holy Roman Empire. At no stage did I refer to the Holy Roman Empire as a German state. David Tombe (talk) 00:36, 23 July 2008 (UTC)

Hello, I think the right solution is to put this information in a satellite article, which could cover the details/nuances. I feel it most definitely does not belong in the intro - it's very important for an intro paragraph to read smoothly and not get bogged down with particular details. Instead, the intro paragraph should include a link to the satellite article, so people who really want to know could read about this issue. Opus33 (talk) 23:27, 22 July 2008 (UTC)

Do you guys have a problem with the fact that Mozart was a German? Mozart was a German and there is absolutely no doubt about the fact. It is nonsense to claim that this fact is 'Point of View'. I can see here that the Mozart's German identity seems to have become the source of controversy, no doubt amongst Austrians who are uneasy about being identified as Germans because of the second world war. An encyclopaedia cannot pander to this kind of emotion. An encyclopaedia is about straight facts. And the straight facts are that Mozart was a German. He came from Salzburg which was a Prince Archbishopric that had once been a part of Bavaria. After Mozart's time, in 1849, Salzburg was transferred to Austria, which at that time was part of the German confederation. Austria itself was expelled from Germany in 1866 because of problems to do with a conflict between the Prussian Hohenzollerns and the Austrian Habsburgs. I came to this article for the sole purpose of finding out if any headway had been made in tracking down the missing fifth movement of Eine Kleine Nacht Music (K. 525). I came to the discussion page only to discover that they were all bickering about whether or not Mozart was a German. Of course he was a German! I noticed then that rather than dealing with the problem, they had all run away from the problem by removing all references to nationality and birth place from the article. They had gone for the cowardly and unprofessional solution. You don't do that. Of course Mozart was a German and that's what should go in the article. Similar controversies exist over the national identities of physicist Heinrich Lenz, and also of Adolf Hitler. But if you look at those articles in wikipedia, you will see that the straight biographical facts have been presented. As such I will now restore Mozart's national identy data to the main article so that readers can know where he originated from, which is what an encyclopaedia article about a person should tell us. Every biographical article begins by stating the national identity and birthplace of the subject. It is one of the key pieces of information that people are looking for when they look up an encyclopaedia article about a person. Finally, as regards the number 626, it's interesting that all the time that the incorrect number 600 prevailed in the introduction, nobody minded. But when I changed it to the correct number 626, somebody removed it completely saying that we don't need a number. Then somebody else restored the original incorrect number of 600, and the person who didn't want a number at all is not complaining. The argument that the article has been stable for some time is not a valid argument. Wikipedia is open to ongoing corrections. Nobody has got the right to declare that the article has now reached a state in which nobody else is allowed to alter it any further. David Tombe (talk) 00:32, 23 July 2008 (UTC)

You are correct that we are open to correction; however, what you suggest is not a correction, but the addition of two inaccuracies.

Mozart had 626 separately listed items in the Köchel catalogue. One Köchel number does not equate to one composition (that's what the little "a" and "b", etc. after the number means -- that there's more than one composition to that particular number). There are not "exactly" 626 compositions. Probably the best way is to say "over 600" -- the "600" in the article, as I read it, was understood as an approximation, not an exact number. An exact number is rather hard to come by; if Alfred Einstein could not do it with absolute certainty, I suspect we would be just a touch overconfident if we thought we could improve on him.

Regarding the "nationality", the most sterile and time-wasting edit-wars on Wikipedia have involved this pointless topic, with comes back with relentless persistence on articles on composers, astronomers, aristocrats, anarchists, horse thieves, and just about everyone else, and I suggest we avoid this particular tar-pit and leave the article as it is. The first sentence of the second paragraph indicates Mozart's origin. Looking at the some of the encyclopedias I have within reach, the 1980 Grove article by Stanley Sadie himself says "Austrian composer" ... the 2001 New Grove article, by Cliff Eisen, begins with "Austrian composer", and Nicolas Slonimsky's impressive article in Baker's Biographical Dictionary commences with the magisterial "supreme Austrian genius of music whose works in every genre are unsurpassed in lyric beauty, rhythmic variety, and effortless melodic invention, ..." So much for NPOV, but he was Slonimsky, and we are mere Wikipedians. I suggest the article was fine as it was. Respectfully, Antandrus (talk) 00:54, 23 July 2008 (UTC)

Hm, you "spam" this discussion page here with your personal POV and write many times that Mozart should have been German (which is not true), but you don't bring any facts and even don't react (or answer) properly to my comment above. You mix between "German" and "Germanspeaking", thats one of your problems. (e.g.: Austrians are Germanspeaking, but they are NOT Germans ... Got it???). And at the time of Mozarts birth, Salzburg was an indipendent Archbishopric, which was - like many other germanspeaking states - part of the Holy Roman Empire (HRR). So sorry if the facts are too complicated for you, but at the time of Mozarts birth there was no national state of Germany (or Austria)! While in the case of Hitler there were already national states, so you can distinguish very well between the time of his Austrian citizenship (which he ended in 1925) and his German citizenship (which started in 1932). Mozart is above such categories, that is why in the germanspeaking Wikipedia we found the compromise to call him an influent "european" composer. PS: Please don't use so many blank lines, they just disturb the reading fluency! -- Rfortner (talk) 01:03, 23 July 2008 (UTC)